Talent crunch is the biggest problem on digital: Rajdeep Chatterjee

Digital is the choice medium for engaging with a large number of customers on a personal level. It’s not surprising that for a brand like Nokia it is the obvious choice to drive consumer engagement and connect with their target audience.

Talking to exchange4media,RajdeepChatterjee, Digital Marketing Manager, Nokia, talks about how the company leverages digital media to create impact on the customer and converts the intent to purchase to an actual purchase.

Chatterjee comes with 15 years of marketing experience. Prior to working at Nokia,he was General Manager -Marketing, McDonald’s. He has worked with Network18 and TimesInternet.

What media gets the largest share of your marketing spends and how much are you spendson digital?

We can’t reveal the exact percentages but television gets the largest share and on digital we are spending in double digits. We are big spenders in our category in digital both in terms of volume as well as percentage of marketing spends.

For the category that you play in, digital is a perfect medium. How do you leverage it?

It is true that for technology or gadgets digital is a very apt space. There are two reasons for it.Firstly the median age of population on digital is 24 which means that majority of our consumers are in that age bracket. They have disposable income and they are not afraid of technology. Also they are always on the internet that too via their mobile phones. We have a fair amount of focus on mobile as a platform to engage with the consumers. Secondly, the audience is very active on social media. We are also quite active on social media to reach out to that segment.

ROI is the biggest question when it comes to digital. What is your view on it, do you get better returns on digital?

One needs to define what a return is for you. Each brand will have its own parameters with which they will define their returns. For us, the engagement the consumer has with the brand is important. We have very huge level of engagement with our consumers on all social media platforms. Having said that, old world marketers do ask how does one increase the sales and how does the engagement on Facebook drive sales. But the thing is that in digital you can measure almost everything and you start believing that actually everything can be measured. Many researches have shown that digital media does have an impact on the purchase decision of the consumer whether the purchase is made online or offline. So impact is there, but you can’t isolate it. It plays a very large role in the whole consumer cycle.

What is trending in digital marketing?
Crowd sourced marketing works really well. We really focus on how to drive engagement with consumers. That is a very important for us and we see it as a major trend right now. Second trend is that you can’t look at digital from simply a campaign point of view. The approach has to be holistic. This is one medium where in it depends on the consumer as to how much they will allow you to communicate with them, unlike television or print where it’s more of a one way communication. It becomes even more critical if the consumer is on mobile since they are paying data charges to view a message from you.

What according to you is lacking in the digital media ecosystem?
Manpower is the biggest problem. Right now you donot get quality manpower in numbers in this segment. Quality resources who have in-depth understanding of this medium and who have been with this medium for some time are hard to find.

How do you see digital advertising growing in next few years?
There is a change in the industry in past few years. Earlier, there used to be a TV campaign and a digital rendition of that at best. Later we started having separate digital campaigns with no connection with the TV campaign. Now for the last six odd months, one would notice that campaigns on all media have a singular thought. So that is a shift that has started to happen. The reason for that is simple. Every brand worth its salt has realized how important all touch points are. Brands have realized that it’s the same consumer present on multiple media today and he is experiencing the brand from different touchpoints. Television is the most efficient medium but the way mobile and videos have taken off, in not so distant future television and digital spends would be at parity.

RajdeepChatterjee is also part of the esteemed jury panel of exchange4media’s Indian Digital Media Awards (IDMA). IDMA 2014 is an annual event that aims to celebrate and encourage the work being done in the digital media space. The event will take place on 6thJune, 2014 in Mumbai. Click here for more details.